Nuclearity and Trace in Monoidal Bicategories and Extended Conformal Field Theories
Nuclear and trace ideals provide a way of formalising, respectively, partial compact closure and partial traces in monoidal categories [1]. Hilbert spaces and bounded linear maps provide the canonical example of a category with a nuclear and trace ideal: the Hilbert-Schmidt maps and the trace class maps respectively.
In this talk, I will give a more modern formulation of nuclear and trace ideals in terms of profunctors and use this to categorify the notions to the setting of monoidal bicategories making use of the theory of pseudocoends [4]. A trace 2-ideal is a monoidal sub-biprofunctor of the hom together with a functor , and a certain higher coherence cell ensuring the trace is monoidally well-behaved. Trace 2-ideals capture the part of a monoidal bicategory that permits a higher trace in the sense of the shadows of [5], and in the case that , I will show that the coherences of the pseudocoend coincide with those of [5].
A nuclear 2-ideal for consists of a monoidal sub-biprofunctor of the hom equipped with a monoidal pseudonatural isomorphism, and invertible 2-cells witnessing the yanking equation, together with coherences including the swallowtail equation familiar from the theory of compact closed bicategories [2]. Indeed, when then is a compact closed bicategory.
As the main example, I will show that the bicategory of infinite dimensional 2-Hilbert spaces has a nuclear and a trace ideal categorifying the story for . Similarly, the bicategory of conformal cobordisms permits a nuclear and a trace ideal and I will use this to give a formalisation of a once extended conformal field theory as a nuclear 2-functor, . This categorifies the result of [3] and formalises some results from [6].
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- [2] J. Baez and L. Langford, Higher-dimensional algebra IV: 2-Tangles, Advances in Mathematics 180 (2003) 705-764.
- [3] R. Blute, P. Panangaden, and D. Pronk. Conformal field theory as a nuclear functor. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 172:101-132, 2007.
- [4] S. Bozapalides. Théorie formelle des bicatégories. PhD thesis, Université Paris 7, 1976.
- [5] K. Ponto and M. Shulman. Shadows and traces in bicategories. Journal of Homotopy and Related Structures, 8:151-200, 2013.
- [6] S. Stolz and P. Teichner. What is an elliptic object? In Topology, geometry and quantum field theory: proceedings of the 2002 Oxford symposium in honour of the 60th birthday of Graeme Segal, number 308, page 247. 2004.